Currencycloud Eyes U.S. Expansion in Bid for More International Payments Volume

Currencycloud, an international payments platform based in the United Kingdom, has hired a U.S. general manager in a push to capture more cross-border payments volume from U.S. merchants.

Currencycloud announced Richard Arundel as the general manager of Currencycloud North America. Arundel, a co-founder of Currencycloud, spent the past two years as vice president of client services in the company’s London office.

“Currencycloud has seen incredible success in Europe, where customers have already processed $25 billion of international payments,” Arundel says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “In terms of the volume of international payments being made, the U.S. is the largest economy for both suppliers and consumers. Yet the payment system for international payments still lags way behind.”

Indeed, cross-border e-commerce, according to the Aite Group LLC and its analysis of these transactions in the United States, Canada, and three small jurisdictions off North America, is projected to reach $122.6 billion in volume in 2020.

“We saw an opportunity to fill that gap in the market by enabling, or empowering, a whole series of domestic providers to globalize their payments for their customers,” Arundel says. “Our ultimate business strategy is to have a presence in all of the markets that international payments generate from.” Currencycloud says its U.S. business in the past two years has had 200% growth rates.

Currencycloud offers two ways for merchants to connect to its cloud-based platform. One is via application programming interface connections that embed the Currencycloud payments service into the merchant’s software. The other way is Currencycloud Direct, a white-label service that does not require creating an infrastructure to support it.

Among Currencycloud’s features are mass payments, built-in compliance with know-your-customer and anti-money laundering rules, data security, and local and international law compliance. It also offers currency conversion and a multi-currency electronic wallet.

The goal is to make international payments easier to make and accept. “Sending an international payment really shouldn’t be that hard, but it can be a major pain point for businesses,” Arundel says. “It is costly, it’s slow, in this era of global commerce you’re often making payments in multiple currencies and it’s full of compliance and regulatory challenges.”

Mangopay, a Luxembourg-based third-party payments specialist that uses Currencycloud, can support more than 700 clients—mainly online marketplaces or crowdfunding sites—in 22 nations, Arundel says. Working with Currencycloud, which is not a payment facilitator, enables Mangopay, which is a payment facilitator, to convert transactions to one of 35 currencies and send payments to 212 nations, he says, without building bank relationships. Mangopay makes almost 11,000 international transfers through Currencycloud per month, he notes.

Payment facilitators, like other Currencycloud clients, face the same challenges with international payments, Arundel says.